


The Hollow

by HaephestusCrex



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Backburner fic, Background Character Death, Blood and Violence, Character Death Fix, Commander Erwin Smith, Dark Fantasy, Dark Magic, Death Rituals, Eventual Smut, F/M, Female Protagonist, Graphic Description of Corpses, Infrequent Updates, Magic, Multi, Necromancy, Other, Pining, Pining Erwin Smith, Reader-Insert, Romance, Sex, commander curious is all about this shit mayn, plotless tbh, things blatantly ripped from other shows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-25 16:21:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30091827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaephestusCrex/pseuds/HaephestusCrex
Summary: The year is 849 when the Survey Corps head on the 35th expedition beyond the Walls on a mission to repurpose a ruin into another outpost and Squad Levi and Squad Hange find a scout whose been missing and presumed dead for a year, sleeping peacefully in a tree, alive and undisturbed against all odds - clutching a journal that spoke of talking titans, with her neck lined with mud."Please, Commander Erwin! Captain Levi! Squad Leaders! You have to find the woman! The woman in the woods! Please! She's still out there - I know she is!" Ilse begs anybody who'll listen, and her survival is simply too fantastical to refuse. Perhaps the young scout has gone mad - she's been in titan country long enough to be, but she swears it, and looks up with so much conviction that it's like staring into a mirror, and so the Commander agrees.And at night? He dreams of your eyes.
Relationships: Erwin Smith & Reader, Erwin Smith/Reader, Ilse Langnar & Reader
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	The Hollow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ///AN: Based on Ilse Langnar's OVA with the Talking Titan. 
> 
> Fic will be infrequently updated until my other Erwin fics are completed or a bit further along.

_Chapter One_

**The Girl in the Hollow**

**\- Year 848 -**

So much of the island seems undisturbed and overgrown, even with lumbering, aimless, stalking titans that crush grass underfoot, much of nature flourishes away from the safety of the Walls. Wandering the landscape, it is equal parts beautiful and terrifying in its unmolested simplicity. It is a marker of all that couldn’t withstand the might of the titans that roam there. Ruins and vestiges of forts that dot the land are one of few signs of humanity, but most are uninhabitable or decrepit piles of brick with no supplies to speak of. It is therefore, a tremendous surprise, when your aimless wander leads you to base of a large, aching, rotting hollow tree, that remains as a maudlin grave pit for the first, and only sign of true human life you had seen since arriving to this marvellously wretched place. It makes the air seize up in your lungs, and for a moment, you forget to breathe, hands reaching for the aged wooden bark as you peer inside.

_“My….”_ a small, awed whisper leaving your throat before you can stop it. The relief that would have washed over you is spiked with sadness as you lean in, your hand gripping a fragile, candlelight lantern that reached out with a flickering flame, illuminating the hollow.

The wind of the night whistles with a quiet, haunting cadence as you gaze into the macabre void of the giant tree. Inside of it, sits a small, upright, feminine form that is slowly freezing itself in place with the beginning vestiges of rigor mortis. Her hands, however, are only slightly faded in lively complexion, hands sitting in her lap patiently, as though waiting for somebody’s arrival, and the glimmer of a lost soul is still dangling on the precipice of being gone completely. Tilting the lantern up, your eyes examine the strange little uniform adornment for all of a moment before looking and noticing that their head is completely divorced from their body. It’s almost like a grisly marionette display, but the intent of it is strangely pure, almost like she was left there with a bizarre care, and an expectation of eventually being discovered.

“ _What a waste_ ,” - your soft and doleful voice is the only thing that pierces the silence afterwards, your feet brushing against the blood that sprayed so many blades of grass around the hollow that would serve as a final resting place. You make the choice to look out quickly, quickly surveying the land by the roots to see where her head might have gone, if not consumed by a titan completely. Stooping to a knee, your hands reached for the soft tufts of dark black hair that stuck out of the untamed lawns of the natural lands.

_‘So, these are Eldian devils as their human selves, then?’_

You turn to the tufts of black hair you’d knelt beside, and turn the head that lay on the ground, barely reacting you see a look of frozen fear, forever emblazoned on a set of unfairly lovely honey-gold eyes - devoid of life, like a remains of unlit comet. You had been filled with a sense of hope and nervous, anxious excitement when you’d seen a body resting within the giant oak, thinking that perhaps, in this marvellous yet melancholy wasteland of untamed green that there might be one other out there like you. Somebody that could survive out here, and the prospect of breaking through your weeks-turned-months of unending loneliness disturbed only by the bulbous eyes of hulking titans had filled you with a little hope. Your eyes actually blurred with frustrated tears when this was, at least initially - not the case, as this poor girl, as preserved as she is - and as strange as her death state is, is very much deceased. She had likely only died earlier - in the daylight hours, not long ago.

_'Well, we can’t have that, can we?’ -_ you think _,_ this poor unfortunate, this mysterious girl, is a sign. Surely now, it means if there is a person this far beyond the Great Walls of Terror, then surely it means that they aren’t so far? To the outside eye, if any soul were watching on this starry, soundless night, it might have been ghoulishly improper and morbid at the very least to be holding a severed head in the manner that you were. It sits flush against your torso as you hoist yourself into the hollow of the tree as best you can, urgently whispered words disappearing into the dark as it almost feels like it warps to accommodate your space. The choice is simple enough, because you don’t know how often anybody ever comes this far, or if this young lady is as rare as a shooting star, and you aren’t willing to make a bet on it.

You are tired, and surviving as opposed to living is no way to exist. The childlike wonder at how the biology of titans who claimed the island as theirs, and had bled into the soil itself and given birth to trees with bones that could touch Gods had long since faded, and you are simply tired, and seek refuge.

So, with all the resolve a tired little witch can muster, you gently begin to move the strangely dressed body, and rustle around in the small, beaten-up, brown satchel at your side until you find a needle, some thread, and a glass mason jar filled to the brim with a viscous, earthy brown fluid that was as thick as the marshes. Questions regarding the girl and her odd state could wait - her brown journal hidden from sight in the shadows of a thick tree root just below. Right now, as cold as her body is, the rot isn’t setting in, not in her soul - she isn’t so far gone. Dead yes, very much so - but not irreversibly so. If you lean your head to her heart, there is nothing but the void of a snuffed lamplight inside of her, but the coldness of the season seemed to be reducing the decay within. Still, what you had in mind might take some work.

“I’m going to need two jars,” you mutter to yourself with a put-out sigh to nobody in particular, pulling another jar of thick, dark, earthy substance.

Like all things, the dead eventually return to the earth, and just as the world takes away, it almost certainly gives back.

And with that, you begin threading, and murmuring a soft string of words into the night, lamplight illuminating the undisturbed tree, and carrying into the night, past the ears of slumbering, dormant titans.

_“Follow the star,”_ you whisper, smears of mud between your fingers and lining your finger tips as the lantern began to glow brighter with every brush against the torn tendons of muscle and flesh around the severed head as you line it to the chilled, cold body, fingers slowly working to thread a needle through her skin. The toughness melts and the decay that seeded itself like a malignant growth in the bones of the young woman began to cease their creeping through the void and silence of her soulless form. You can already tell by how slow the mud is to work that this is going to take a very long time, and brace yourself to work through the night, chanting into the darkness. You work diligently, because the prospect of company is too desperately desired and it has been so, so very long since you'd seen another person, alive or not. Even the few ruins you'd seen had been so demolished that just entering them felt structurally unsound. You recall seeing what looked like a spire, a vestige of an older era, perhaps - a history that has remained untouched for decades now. There was nothing there, and you'd almost given up completely until you saw what appeared to be an empty tin of fish which had been scraped clean but still had a remnant of an odour, betraying that humans are still on the island. Somewhere.

By the Gods, it is a lonely existence though - wandering blindly and fearfully through the grassy titan fields of Paradis, picking desperately through the remnants of crumbling stone to find something - anything - about how to get to the Walls. You don't even know how receptive they'd be, there's a reason they seclude themselves so, but with the encroachment of Marley and being driven from your own land, there's even fewer places you're allowed to be that are indisputably safe and easier to travel to. The thing with this place is, it is so forsaken by the rest of the world that there was no stopping you from boarding a rickety excuse for a boat and setting sail. There was no way your boat would have survived until you got to Hizuru, and you were unwilling to take a bigger risk into patrolled waters to go so far. You'd left in something of a hurry, and the fact you'd had anything at all packed and ready to flee at a moments notice had been a symbol of your unwillingness to fight to the last man. So many of your sisters were dead, people you had known your entire life, as Marley encroached into your home. If even the most consecrated of Old Land couldn't survive their onslaught, what chance did you have?

That isn't to say you left quietly into the night, but now - now you were on the _radar -_ and slipping into the dangerous, uncompromising, most well-guarded nations in the world is the most doable option, though not the safest. The exclusion of it all had been maddening, as you'd only the company of your own thoughts, and these thoughts - this emptiness, was overpowering. So perhaps yes, this needy attachment to the unfortunately beheaded young woman you'd found was unhealthy at best and disturbing at worst, but she was still _here -_ her spirit, not so far gone. 

The decay settling inside of her body had, at the very least, reduced to a quiet whimper, before ceasing completely. If this was your own land - consecrated, and ancient, seeded with power, you'd have buried her as you'd have buried most in her position, and in most cases, she would have been awake by now, but the soil here is...different. The titan forests are unique and strange in their biology, the decades of their presence has seeped into the very earth and caused the trees that spout to be tall, thick, wildly untamed and almost impossibly far reaching. It was unlike anything in the known world, but because of this, you are uncertain as to whether putting this young lady in the ground is perhaps as good as an idea as it usually is. So, you're using what small remnants you have of your own, consecrated soil and mud. The fact it is taking so long to work though is unsettling to you, as the response is almost immediately visible, though time consuming. Right now, you have to still your fingers against the girl's severed neck and feel for the movement of tendons beneath them, however slow, before you realise it's working, but at a horrifically arduous pace.

_Perhaps, it is because of her bloodline? I've never tried my special mud on a Subject of Ymir._

It is the only thing you can think of as the reason, and so days - well, days turn to weeks. The hollow becomes more expansive within, though again, not to a grandiose extent, enough for the pair of you to lay down at least - which is good, because once her heart begins to beat again, you are rubbing her arms and legs, moving them occasionally to encourage blood flow, and this required time and space. She'd not much on her either - to be quite honest, just the clothes on her back, and a cloak which you'd taken to using as a blanket for her prone form. Your own supplies are meagre, but enough to get by, and are very much indicative of how long you'd roughed it in the woodlands. You've a clay bucket that is a little misshapen, and carries both rain water, and whatever you manage to forage, a small satchel for your glass jars, and a rucksack containing just a single thicker blanket, another shirt, towel, water pouch, a few little knives, books and a first aid kit. You used it to carry the lion's share of whatever you can find, but it isn't much. In one of the ruins, at least, you had found a none-too-rusted metal pot to cook in, small as it was, it's at least deep and even something that simple had many uses that made survival easier.

For safety, moving around at night is the best option, as the titans are inactive, but low visibility makes it harder to find your way back and limits how far out you can go unless you're prepared to move your entire encampment, which is what you'd been doing - from tree to tree more or less, until you'd encountered the young woman's body. You didn't want to lose her either, so you were having to get a little more inventive with your foraging, picking more than just your share of edible weeds and flowers, but shaving off oyster mushrooms and digestible fungus from dying trees with your small knife scraping against the bark, trying to make as little noise as possible. 

At night you would move, rucksack on your back and lantern in hand, ready to smother the light in your shawl. The issue is, even night time isn't fully safe. The light of the moon is enough to keep some titans moving around aimlessly, and some retain energy from daylight hours longer into the night, this, combined with a distinct lack of eyelid for many of them, meant an accidental shine of your light in the wrong place could result in being chased persistently by the marauding beasts. You would never forget the nine metre beast who you had accidentally cast candlelight on and had to run blindly in the dark, hearing it crawling on all fours with a sickening gait that you found haunting your dreams and heightening your anxiety whenever you departed from the hollow. The hollow is at least safe, partially warded at least, as such protections are best and mostly applied to stationary places, and helped you feel better about sleeping there, and leaving the young woman's recovering body. They're not the most powerful wards - there's not much you know that can offensively keep out a titan that a singular practitioner can cast but -a ritual to fall into peaceful obscurity - to ignore all lights, sounds and smells emitting from it, is just about manageable. 

It'd be easier, perhaps, if you weren't expending so much effort to forage and to recover the young lady but, you were so close - every day, the seams of her neck felt stronger, though you can already tell that the needlework you'd done, whilst good, was just not healing in the manner that it normally would. Again, perhaps, you wonder if because this is a Subject of Ymir, but the fact that blood is starting to clot and scar viciously is a good sign, and if you're very, very quiet, you can hear her pulse, with air slowly filling her lungs. She hasn't woken - the state she's in can perhaps, best be described as comatose, but you can feel something there - like a thread of consciousness. You'd hoped that by the time she awakes, you'll have a nice, hearty meal for her - as much as one can gather in these parts, anyway.

There's a stream that's easier to find in the dark if you're listening for the sounds of water and ignoring the beating fear in your chest - with lantern light, spearfishing is certainly doable if you know how river life likes to slumber. It felt quite primal - almost medieval, the way you're living, jabbing a sharpened stick into the water while your lantern light dangles over your head from a long branch you'd rammed into your now-filled rucksack, the lantern dangling off the edge leers over your flat brim hat and onto the water below like a glowing antennae. Each stab is quick, brutal and without fanfare, trying to keep all splashing sounds to a minimum to keep attention off of you.

You spend a year like this, avoiding titans when you can, meaningfully scraping whatever natural resource you can - be they ambiguous, large, unsettlingly sized berries, slumbering fish, or even fistfuls of chicory flowers and even clover weeds. You would scrape the untouched lands for every edible product you could find and would crawl back into the hollow before daybreak, idly talking about the things you'd managed to squirrel away. You'd done your best to take care of the prone body - it was a welcome distraction and momentary respite from your own grief and punishing inner dialogue. It is, however, far harder than most would think - remembering to keep her blood circulating, trying to hamfistedly wash her clothes and yours from too-heavy buckets of water frantically stolen away in the night from the stream, and brushing her hair with your fingers as your own hairbrush had broken a while back under the long, tough knottiness of your matted, long hair. The now-ratty sea sponge remains you'd had in your bag weren't going to survive many more amateur attempts at washing, either, but having this person - a real person and not a titan - quietly breathing in the hollow near you - for a while, it's enough.

You had been excited when you'd recovered a small journal near the tree, undoubtedly the girl's - which might have shed some light on why she was found the way she was. After all, most titans swallowed the flesh they bit into, and didn't tend to display remains, so finding not only her removed head, but her body displayed, was a constant source of wonder. Unfortunately, it seems the people of the Walls write in an older form of Eldian, it reads differently, and unfortunately, Ancient Tongues was never your strong suit, so you couldn't decipher it, but keep it near the woman for when she'd eventually awaken.

A year was more easily whittled away like this, even as it became harder and harder to endure - and the _suffering -_ dear Gods - what a wretched place to be lost in. You didn't want to move from the relatively safe location, though, and would prefer to wait until the woman is awake, before you can move her with you and hopefully meander your way to the Walls. Days are spent boiling fish bones and clovers into a weak stew as you stroke her hair idly and talk about the near misses you'd had, the herbs you'd found, and how much you missed home. You told her stories - pointless ones - just to fill the quietness, and to hopefully ease her into more wonderous dreams than whatever she might be suffering through. 

You can tell the way her closed eyelids tremble that she must hear you on some level, but as somebody who has died many deaths, you are almost certain that wherever she is - she is surely suffering trying to find her way home. So you keep telling her stories. Wonderous ones, like The Boy Who Fell in Love with a Star and The Frog Prince, - as you brush dirt out of her hair and check her scabs and scars around her haphazardly healing neck, which was, unlike most things you'd ever healed, leaving a horrific scar that would surely be permanent right around the circumference of her frail throat.

Over time, this strange, bigger-on-the-inside hollow began to fill with life, despite the mighty, gargantuan oak, slowly rotting, and beginning to manifest spores and pleasant, edible mushrooms as a sign of its death throes. Creeping moss and hanging plants began to encroach into the space that had become your own.

One day, you have to leave during daybreak, to get a clear look into a potentially closer tree or place to make an encampment once the young woman would wake - you can tell it will be soon. Without a second thought, you leave your pot with boiled fish bone remnants and chicory flower in the tree along with your flat brim hat so you'd have better visibility - it's far too sunny for it to rain, and you want to feel the heat on your face, and promise the sleeping girl you'll be back soon. 

You're so excited to tell her that you know where your next encampment could be, bounding on your feet, filled with a frenetic excitement as you do your best to clear the mercifully titan free area to get back to your base.

When the young woman isn't there, however, you feel your lungs seize, and your heart pound, hands frantically coursing over the bark as your vision begins to blur. The strangely peaceful routine you'd developed had broken, and you'd wondered, for a moment, if your wards had failed, but you're certain they hadn't - and then, if perhaps, the girl had gotten up and left. Of her own free will.

Perhaps it's unhealthy, and selfish of you, but the notion of it - after a year?

It's almost a heartbreak, and once again, you are alone, unknowing of the green cloaked figures that sit impossibly high in the tree tops, watching - as you crumple to your knees, surrounded by the tree roots. It's stupid to feel as entitled as you do, to the consistency and reliability of the unknown girl, who, after her scarring, you'd come to call _patchwork princess._ Perhaps it is selfishness and ego to want so badly to be the first person to see her eyes open - you had poured so much magic, time and effort into bringing her back, the way one might tend a wilting garden, trying desperately to nurture it to light. 

What if she dies again? You can sense she's alive - you just don't know _where,_ or if she's in trouble.

Will you ever get to the Walls?

There's nothing else for it.

A noise escapes you, a broken, horrid, ugly, slip of a sound that's more of a mewl before your shoulders tremble and you start to cry, standing in front of the empty hollow, hands balling up into fists that you childishly push into your face, tears leaking through your fingers. You shudder out a bewildered cry that's almost incomprehensible, as though demanding that whatever powers that be explain themselves to you. Your one reprieve from your loneliness and personal void had been stolen from you, and your tenuous grip on sanity in this long, vast titan wasteland feels irreversibly shaken.

There's nothing else to do.

So you cry, and crawl into the hollow alone.


End file.
